


Dragons on the Wind of Morning

by duh_i_read (duh_i_write)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Death Fix, Dragon biology, Dragons, Essos, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, How Does Time Work In Game of Thrones, Implied/Referenced Sex, Magic, Mild Gore, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Canon, Season/Series 08 Spoilers, Self-Indulgent, Timeline What Timeline, What Do Dragons Do With Their Days
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2020-09-29 22:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20443907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duh_i_write/pseuds/duh_i_read
Summary: "I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning."― Ursula K. Le GuinDragons are not so easily killed. A post-canon resurrection story.





	1. Who Can Know the Heart of a Dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time moves different to a dragon, but Drogon knows when a hatching is near.

Dragons are not men. 

Dragons are magic.

They do not think like men, feel like men, see like men. Men see faces and color, dragons see all that and the movement of the wind, the heat of living things and the shades of magic. 

Drogon flies, crying to the wind and sea.

He is alone. His brothers gone, his mother nearly so.

He flies. Instinct and memory lead him to a land shadowed in magic. 

He flies over the seas and cities to follow the coast. He doesn’t stop to rest or drink, even if his wing ache and the ich of a hundred small wounds mar his back and tail.

The land changes from dry to wet, heavy and warm. The only solid things are crumbling stone buildings that dot the land like trees. 

He slows his wingbeats when he enters the place where the magic has weight, moves like smoke in swirling patterns that hold him aloft. He heads to the mountain.

Drogon smells the liquid stone, feels where the magic and heat oozes up orange and red and black. 

He lands close to the top, where the rock formed a flat plain. Using his wingtip to balance, Drogon crawls on three limbs to rest his mother near where stone gives way to churning hot liquid bubbles and steams. She is nearly gone, a wisp of blue magic remains in her small form.

With a firm push of his nose, his mother falls in, her covering burst into flame and she sinks out of view.

Drogon waits. And waits. And waits, leaving only once to swallow mouthfuls of brackish water at the base of the mountain.

The plumes of magic change: raw liver, sand, old blood, hot iron.

Time moves different to a dragon, but Drogon knows when a hatching is near. He hunts then, filling his belly before piling more where he laid his mother down. 

The color of magic change, storm, and sunrise, liquid stone spits hot. Drogon waits, curled as if to shield this sight from the world. 

From the churning pit, a dragon’s head emerges.


	2. Bride of Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is fitting, returning to the Great Grass Sea.

It is fitting, returning to the Great Grass Sea. 

Where she learned to become a queen, a Khaleesi, the Mother of Dragons. 

Now, she’s traded women's curves and queen’s bearings for a supine tail and hands stretched thin, laced together with delicate webbing She cannot yet fly, cannot breathe fire for longer than an eye blink. A babe in all but mind.

She rides on her familiar spot between Drogon’s wings, flexing her new talons into the groves of his spine as they travel to the Sea. 

They nest in a cave in a high mountain, their home carved out of a sheer grey cliff like a god scooped it from a pile of sand. They are nowhere near the roads men use through the Bone Mountains, only paths made by goats and sheep. From their perch, she can see for miles.

Not that spends the time to look. She sleeps more than she had since she was young. Her days pass draped over the sun-warmed outcrop that juts from their cave, devouring whatever Dragon has killed: ponies and goats and sheep with tight curled horns, still smoking from his fire. It’s the idlest she’s been since girlhood and she loathes it, this time spent with nothing but her thoughts. 

In her dreams, her mistakes and missteps are as bright as a banner on open land. The worst are of her betrayal. Her throne. The knife. Her happiness fleeing swift as her blood over his hand and her rage flares up hot. She wakes shrieking, buried in memories of the windswept isle and the reeking city on the bay. Pours all her anger down the connection with her child, goading him to return her to her birthplace, tear down her enemies.

Drogon drinks her rage and shelters her under his wing until her anger is mere dregs and she collapses in an uneasy sleep. Drogon, her most vicious of children, cares little of the land to the west, is embers where she is brush fire.

She grows bigger. Skin stretching and breaking, coming off her in swaths like unspooling bolts of cloth. She imagines every scorched bone an enemy as she breaks them with her teeth and hurls them against the stone. She cries for her dead. her closest friend. Her old bear. Her sons. Her husband. The child of her flesh. Her fire grows hotter as she rages, the stone blackens and the bones become ash. Drogon begins to bring live ponies with broken backs and she slaughters them with gore-soaked joy.

She learns to fly, a frustrating task. Having known the freedom in flight, the power in it, her failures hurt worse than any fall. Once she masters the way her lithe body moves in the air, flight is harder than before. The air has currents, plain as waves, and she can feel changes in the wind along her horns and over her ridged spines. Her tail is the rudder, her wings sails and she is a crew of one to keep herself aloft. What a treasure she had, simply mounting Drogon as one would a steed. She croons her thanks to him for then and now, even as her chest aches with the effort. 

That first season when the rains pour for days and days, she barely leaves the cave. The rain makes flying difficult and hunting frustrating. She stays coiled in the back of the cave, dreaming. Of Missandei, of Jorah. She holds tight to these memories, the bright ones full of possibilities. None of the last moments of her friends' lives. For days she sleeps, trodding these familiar paths in the grass and sand and cities. 

Time passes; the skies darken with the rain and soon dry as old bones. 

They fly together again, only she is wingtip to wingtip with her son now, two shadows across the clouds. The travelers flee from them. The Dothraki leave them be. She suspects their numbers are smaller from their loyalty to her.

Still, the Khalasars ride, a brown ribbon through the grass.

Dust billows as traders return to the market at Vaes Dothrak. They avoid soaring close to the roads that scar the Sea, Drogon immovable in his avoidance of men. Instead, they follow the wild horses that hide in the grass, pick off the sheep that climb over their mountain home, explore the ruins that dot the land and eat whatever has nested there. 

Drogon reluctance of men goes as far as the Womb of the World, a lake so large you cannot view the opposite shore from the water’s edge. She goes alone sometimes, to assert that she is his mother and keeps her own counsel. It is the only place she can see her reflection, admire her scales the color of cloth of gold, her horns wine red and her jewel amethyst eyes.

A living Targaryan idol, like the harpies of Meereen. She could go there, melt the harpy statues and make them worship her. She did love her pyramid. But she is not large enough to take a whole city. Yet.

Time passes; the grass grows green and tall, then gold and dry.

Dany sleeps for shorter times now during the rains, dreaming of mornings she broke fast with Missandei and Grey Worm, the miles and miles she rode sliver besides Jorah, the silk pillows she shared with Irri and Jhiqui as they shared stories. Drogo’s tenderness. The smell of lemons from her window in her childhood home.

A life of battles won and wars lost, snatched happiness and fleeting joy. It is simpler, to be a dragon true, to sleep and eat and shit with no fear. Little can stop a dragon, and she was mistaken to think her family’s crest meant she was impervious as them.

There is little of her that remains of her old self but her memories and a wine-dark mark on her chest. With the burden of queendom gone, the heavy mantle of the Last Targaryan, she is unsure what remains. She cannot just live like a beast in the field, dumb to the world. But what?

The question grows as she does. Her horns come in with a maddening itch that she tills miles of ground to scratch. Her ruff grows longer, rasing in anger or alarm almost without thought. Still. She has a long way to go before she is as large as Drogon. Maybe it’s their untamed life, or that she was not born from an egg, but the top of her horns barely reach to the middle of his foreleg and is but half as long.

But oh, she is strong. A horse in each talon doesn’t tire her, nor does the day-long flight to the Shivering Sea. She pushes her limits, her mind craving something to fill her time besides the hunt and her memories. 

She perches close to the roads, still as stone and listens to the chatter of passing caravans. the wheel of power rolls on, the names change but the small and weak are crushed just the same. She attacks them occasionally, when it is clear they are slavers, eating the men with fine clothes and bloody whips, breaking the barred wagons and melting the chains when she can.

The purpose changes her and the taste of charred man, tender as piglets, warmed her belly. One less monster.

Her hunting grounds widened to the mountain passes, the dusty roads, the shores of the Womb of the World. 

It was these shores where she found her first offering. Tied to a squat, windswept tree, two horses, soot black and bone white. A flash of concern from her son strikes across their connection, he is hidden in the clouds above and wants her to flee. He disapproves of her dealing with men, and more so of this deliberate gift. Oh, but she hungers for this as much as the meat. A tithe for a breaker of chains, of a queen. 

Lighting the horses aflame and splitting their bellies for the steaming insides, she eats her fill and leaves the rest. Visits the lake more and more. The tithes become regular. Drogon begins to accompany her, nothing truly scares a dragon as long as a royal caravan. Still, he is wary, never eating to keep watch and as she eats the sacrifices. 

Once, for her pleasure, she finds a girl bound to the windswept tree and crying. The sight lights a fire in her breast, her brushfire rage stoaked to an inferno as she smells the girls afraid fear.

Gliding low enough for her belly to brush the tops of the grass, she tracks the men that brought the girl, a tribe of shepherds. She eats them all, sets their tents aflame, kills every goat she finds. Dany returns to uproots the tree with her horns which frees the girl, who cries her thanks in broken Dothraki and runs into the grass. 

Her sacrifices by the lake grow as they try to appease her. Never again is it a person.

Time passes; the goats move down and up the mountain's peak as the rain ebbs and flows. 

By now their cave is covered in a soft layer of ash and shed scales, a groove in the very back worn away by her body fits her curled form perfectly. Finer than any velvet cushion or feather bed. Her child, she knows, is content here, well-fed and sun-baked. They could be dragons of the mountain, the dread of slavers. Feasting ghosts that shepherds and traders sacrifice their best animals to save their caravans and villages. 

But she grows restless, yearns for something she has no words for. 

When clouds block the sun, her rain dreams change: a sword calloused hand against her hip. A bearded kiss on her thigh. Laughing in the dark in the belly of a ship. The smell of ice and fur and woodsmoke. Something quivers in her body, a feeling nearly forgotten. 

Another hunger. 

She wants to tear his flesh apart, feel his fear, feel him against her. He is rightfully hers, by heart and by blood. He is a dragon. Trapped as she was, a king's bearings and a soft, scarred body. 

Death slid off him like a fur cloak once. She will rip it from him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of the geography mentioned is from book canon, pulled from a Wiki of Ice and Fire. As GRRM plays fast and loose with meteorologic seasons, so am I. 
> 
> Some reptiles do hibernate (called brumation) and it is periods of sleeping and occasionally drinking water, not the continuous sleep of mammals.


	3. So Comes Snow After Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon Snow spends his last days on the coast of the Shivering Sea.

Jon Snow spends his last days on the coast of the Shivering Sea. This wildling clan, the fourth such he’d traveled with, migrates to the shore in times of light snow.

The hunting boats leave at dawn, but Jon stays ashore. He has no desire to leave land again. Too many memories bitter in his mouth.

So he stays ashore, with the tents and the squat wooden shelter, skinning seals and knotting fishing nets with old and young. The youngest ones beg to hear the story of the battle at Hardhome, the battle for the Dawn, the Fall of the Wall.

No, he has enough ghosts haunting him, nightmares of the dead, of a city of ash, of the bright, needful look in his Queen's eyes before he stuck a dagger in both their hearts.

It is a harsh, quiet life for someone of royal blood. Better than he deserves. 

He just laid out the newest net on the rocky shore, knotted around stout ironwood pegs when the horn from the lookout sounds. Jon looks up, the ships were not arriving, he sees nothing on the horizon but a few clouds dotted by circling birds. 

The horn sounds again. A tremor of fear grips him as he looks down the shore where Hardhome's wreckage lay. He could not battle the dead again. Would not.

Again, the horn sounds. There could be raiders in the woods. He left Longclaw behind in the wooden hall, only a dagger and Ghost for protection.

Then he hears it. A deep cry from his nightmares. 

Over the water, a dragon, straight as an arrow shooting towards them.

The clan elders have taken cover in the woods, dragging children who stare mutely as the dragon draws closer.

Jon stays, unmoving. A brush of fur at his side. He stares down at Ghost, digs his fingers in the soft fur between his scarred ears. Ghost looks up at him, and Jon feels the love and sadness between them. 

With a lick of his hand, Ghost turns and melts into the forest.

The dragon lands. It’s hide hammered gold, nearly white where the scales stretch between its wings. Along its back and head spikes the red of hours old blood. On its breast, a wine-dark slash of color over its heart.

Death is here for him. 

His last death did not stick, but this would. It is his penance made flesh to pass judgment on his crimes. It should be a dragon, pale and violet-eyed like Targaryen’s past, avenging her death and ending him and his cursed line both. 

He is ready. Any worth his life held became wind after slaying his love for duty. He stands before the growling dragon, ready for its maw to open and the flash of heat and teeth.

Its face moves close, he can make out the small gold scales of its face, breaths in the smoke rising from its nose. Jon slowly unstraps his cloak, a precious thing of black shadowcat fur, and tosses it on the sand. Bright violet eyes track his movements. He stares into them as he held his hands up. He will not fight this; he’s been a terrible steward of dragons.

The dragon brushes warm rough scales against his hands. Like falling in a murky pool and touching bottom, he can sense her. Rage and yearning and hunger and hunger and hunger and love like sharp rocks that cut across his palm.

He jerks his hands back, breaths her name like an oath and she rears back and slams her head into him. His world collapses into darkness.


End file.
